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Archive for March, 2014

“It’s about time!” shouted the collective voice of enterprise IT experts and undergraduate college students on Thursday as Microsoft finally, FINALLY released Office for iPad. Well, not all of Office. Instead, it’s the three most commonly used components: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And they didn’t cut corners, either — these are beautiful, well thought out, iOS7 native apps that trump every Office imitator in the App Store.

Each app is built off of the Office 2013 version of its PC predecessor, mimicking both the style and the functionality of those desktop stalwarts. They still tow the iOS7 style line, though, with the busy Ribbons of the desktop replaced by slick, minimalist rows of icons. In terms of features they are not as robust as the desktop versions, but I was still impressed with just how much nuance of functionality each app did carry with it.

Word(App Store Link) is arguably the app that most users have been awaiting. There is astonishingly little to complain about with it. It looks and feels like Word 2013 in most of the ways that matter. Its basic word processing features are all there; I was able to do things like offset long quotations, add full page headers complete with pagination, and hang indents for source citation with only a little bit of a learning curve.

Microsoft has also carried over an impressive amount of the finer formatting features; while design power users will certainly feel the loss of advanced Style, Font, Paragraph, and similar features, there’s still a fair amount of each for most people to appreciate. And just wait until the first time you need to place and resize an image; it’s actually a better approach than on the desktop. I did find the lack of access to Office clip art to be a glaring error in the images department, though.

Excel(App Store Link), much like its word processing kin, is streamlined while still sporting a lot of functionality. This one was probably the trickiest of the three titles to port, and that shows a bit in the way you interface and in the more advanced features that don’t seem to be readily available. Still, I am not a CPA and so for my own needs — like running a monthly home budget — it was just fine.

Excel also has one killer feature going for it: its alternate keyboard. Tapping a toggle above the standard keyboard in Excel activates a custom alternative keyboard that deftly imitates a standard keyboard number pad layout. The muscle memory I’ve developed from years of entering figures into cells with the number pad was ecstatic to see this. I wish Apple would make such a keyboard a permanent part of the iOS structure.

PowerPoint(App Store Link) is my favorite of the three. As a creative, visually-based presentation program, there was a lot that Microsoft could do to translate things to the touch interface. And much like Word and Excel, it was also necessary to moderate features while still giving users plenty to work with. I think that Microsoft struck the best balance with this one. It’s got the same great image manipulation that Word sports, not to mention new templates and other design options. It also has a really cool laser pointer feature for when you are delivering your PPT from the device, creating a red, glowing cursor on the screen that appears when you touch the screen and follows your finger movement.

The biggest gripe one could level at the Office for iPad apps is the cost. In order to do more than view documents in these apps, you must have an active subscription to Office 365, which currently runs at $99 a year (though Microsoft has already announced plans for an entry-level $69 choice). That feels expensive; but to be frank, I don’t see that as a huge issue. Businesses will already be paying for Office 365 as part of their licensing agreements, and most college students have probably already picked up the Office 365 University Edition (which comes with a four year subscription). As these are unquestionably the two biggest core audiences for these apps, I can’t see how the cost becomes a significant barrier to adoption.

As of today, the workplace productivity crown on iPad is currently contested by two sets of apps: Office and iWork. Both do so many things so incredibly well. iWork has been here longer, and it’s free on new devices, and it’s a great app all around; but Office is, well, Office, and so I think that it will very quickly become the leading productivity trio in the App Store.

Melt 1 tablespoon butter in an 8-inch nonstick skillet over medium heat. Season eggs with salt and pepper.

Add half of eggs to skillet. Cook eggs, stirring gently with a heatproof silicone spatula, until eggs are lightly scrambled and almost cooked, about 3 minutes. Spread eggs evenly to cover bottom of skillet.

Top eggs with half of ricotta, Parmesan, basil, and chives. Using spatula, fold up one-third of omelet. Roll omelet over onto itself, then slide omelet onto a plate. Repeat with remaining ingredients to make a second omelet. Top with Cherry Tomato Vinaigrette.

Samples from 12 of the corpses were taken for forensic analysis. In at least four cases, scientists found traces of the DNA of theYersinia pestis, confirming they had contact with the plague prior to their death.

To pinpoint which historical plague outbreak the “Charterhouse 25” could have fallen victim to, the researchers used radio carbon dating.

They determined the burial ground was used in at least two distinct periods – the earliest within the Black Death in 1348-50, followed by a later outbreak in the 1430s.

The bodies were found in a Crossrail shaft

In a bid to understand just how far the grave extends across the square, Crossrail approached the University of Keele to undertake a forensic geophysics survey – using ground-penetrating radar.

The initial scan detected signs of further burials across Charterhouse Square and also the foundations of a building – possibly a chapel.

Traces of plague bacteria were found in the teeth of the skeletons

“We will undertake further excavations in Charterhouse Square later this year to confirm some of the results,” said Mr Carver.

The skeletons provide a rare opportunity to study the medieval population of London, according to osteologist Don Walker, of the Museum of London Archaeology.

He said: “We can start to answer questions like: where did they come from and what were their lives like?

“I’m amazed how much you can learn about a person who died more than 600 years ago.”

Analysis of isotope levels in the skeletons’ bones and teeth indicate that:

Many of the skeletons appear to suffer signs of malnutrition and 16% had rickets.

There is a high rate of back damage and strain indicating heavy manual labour.

The later skeletons from the 1400s had a high rate of upper body injury consistent with being involved in violent altercations.

13 of the skeletons were male, three female, two children, the gender was undetermined in the other seven skeletons.

40% grew up outside London, possibly as far north as Scotland – showing that 14th Century London attracted people from across Britain just as it does today.

Mr Carver said: “We can see from the people here that Londoners weren’t living an easy life.

“The combination of a poor diet and generally a struggle means they were very susceptible to the plague at that time and that’s possibly one of the explanations for why the Black Death was so devastating.”

Archaeologist Jay Carver hopes to explore more of the burial site

By sequencing the ancient bacterial DNA, researchers hope to understand how the plague has evolved and spread over the centuries.

Globally the infection still kills 2,000 people a year, including countries like Madagascar. Antibiotics are available, but if untreated the disease kills within four days.

When it comes to detecting lies, you should trust your instinct, research suggests.

We are better at identifying liars when we rely on initial responses rather than thinking about it, say psychologists.

Generally we are poor at spotting liars – managing only slightly better than flipping a coin.

But our success rate rises when we harness the unconscious mind, according to a report in Psychological Science.

“What interested us about the unconscious mind is that it just might really be the seat of where accurate lie detection lives,” said Dr Leanne ten Brinke of the University of California, Berkeley.

“So if our ability to detect lies is not conscious – we simply can’t do this when we’re thinking hard about it – then maybe it lives somewhere else, and so we thought one possible explanation was the unconscious mind.”

Primate suspect

When trying to find out if someone is lying, most people rely on cues like someone averting their gaze or appearing nervous.

However, research suggests this is not accurate – people perform at only about 50% accuracy in traditional lie detection tasks.

Psychologists at the University of California were puzzled by this, as some primates, such as chimps, are able to detect deceit – and evolutionary theory supposes that it maximises survival and reproductive success.

People are not good at spotting deception

Dr Ten Brinke and colleagues devised experiments to test the ability of the unconscious mind to spot a liar, to see if they could do better than the conscious mind.

They gave 72 students videos to watch of “suspects” in a mock crime. Some of the suspects in the videos had stolen a $100 bill from a bookshelf, whereas others had not, but all were told to pretend they had not stolen the money.

When the participants were asked to say who they thought was lying and who was telling the truth, they were able to detect liars only 43% of the time, and truth-tellers only 48% of the time.

Intuitive sense

Then the researchers used a word association task to test unconscious perception.

The volunteers were asked to look at a picture of the suspect’s face and choose which words came to mind from two lists – words such as untruthful and dishonest, or words such as honest and valid.

They performed better, providing evidence that we may have some intuitive sense, outside of conscious awareness, that detects when someone is lying.

This may mean intuitive decisions – such as who to be friends with and who to date – are guided by our unconscious mind telling us someone may be lying, said Dr Ten Brinke.

She added: “It’s possible that we make decisions on a daily basis as to who we are going to continue to interact with, so we decide to become friends with some people and not others, to continue dating some people and not others, or to work closely with some and not others.

“Perhaps some of this decision is driven by our intuitive sense that some of these people we choose not to interact with are lying to us.”

At midnight on 29 March 2004, the Republic of Ireland became the first country in the world to ban smoking in the workplace.

It was one of the first moves in a global trend.

The Irish health minister at the time, Micheál Martin, remembers a conversation with his counterpart from New Zealand.

She told him that if the pub-loving Irish could bring in a smoking ban, then the rest of the world could do it too.

That is what happened. In the ten years since, many other countries have brought in smoke-free laws.

But the strength of the restrictions varies – and there are some places where it has not happened.

So, a decade on, what has been the impact of this type of law on the health of the nations?

With the aim of answering that question, former BBC Ireland correspondent Denis Murray and I packed our bags for a journey across Europe, to make Clearing the Air for BBC Radio Four.

‘Time warp’

We began in the Czech Republic, which has some of the most liberal smoking laws in the EU – bars and restaurants are free to permit their customers to have a puff inside.

Musée de Fumeurs is a Paris museum dedicated to the history of smoking

Football night in a Prague bar felt like a time warp – a blue fog hung in the atmosphere.

By the end of the night, our hair and clothes smelled of smoke.

We found that in the Czech Republic – which went through Nazi and Communist oppression in the 20th Century – people were very suspicious of anything that restricted freedom.

Vratislav Brabanec is a musician who has a revolutionary past. He plays the saxophone for the Plastic People of the Universe – a band whose arrest became a cause célèbre for anti-communist protesters.

A keen smoker, he was disdainful of the smoke-free laws in the likes of the UK and Ireland.

“In the next generation, everything will be prohibited,” he claimed. “Laughing, drinking, smoking – it will all be banned.”

But Dr Eva Kralikova, who runs a smoking cessation clinic, said she longed for a ban on smoking in the workplace.

She argued that if the Czech Republic brought in a law like Ireland’s, it would result in 5,500 fewer heart attacks a year.

So how has the ban gone down in France – a country which is hard to associate with non-smoking?

The land of Gauloises and Gitanes has had a ban on lighting up in bars and restaurants since 2007.

We absolutely had to pay a visit to the Musée de Fumeurs in Paris.

There, the owner Raphael Freund told us that he actually thought tobacco was not something to be consumed every day.

But he was sceptical about the ban – he said it had not helped people to give up.

Dr Catherine Hill told us smoking was an epidemic

However, Dr Catherine Hill, an epidemiologist at France’s largest cancer hospital, believed the case against tobacco was unanswerable – and governments should do whatever they could to tackle smoking.

But she said the proportion of people who smoked had not reduced since the ban had come in.

And she was worried about the levels of smoking among women in particular.

“We’re just at the beginning of the epidemic,” she said.

In Dublin, Mr Martin, who brought in the Irish ban, was emphatic that it had had a beneficial effect.

“The biggest difference of all is simply the quality of life people now enjoy at public meetings, going into hotels, having their meals,” Mr Martin, the current leader of the Irish opposition, said.

Ireland is one of several countries now proclaiming a goal of a tobacco-free future – and Mr Martin thought that, eventually, a tobacco-free world could be a reality.

Dr Hill agreed that it was eventually inevitable because, she said, smoking was “just insane” – a habit that was killing millions of people.

But the tobacco industry was optimistic.

Axel Gietz from Imperial Tobacco – the fourth largest such firm in the world – told us he was bullish about the prospects for companies like his.

The land of Gauloises and Gitanes has had a ban on lighting up in bars and restaurants since 2007

“Evidence from around the world shows that ever stricter regulation has not prevented a hardcore of adults – let’s say 20% – from choosing to smoke. Ambitious goals for a smoke-free society do not take this simple fact of life into account.”

Whatever the future of tobacco, it is clear that the Irish smoking ban had a profound effect on the relationship between the cigarette and society.

This year, Russia will extend its smoking ban to all bars and restaurants and China plans to outlaw lighting up in public.

They are two of the world’s most populous countries – and also have some of the highest smoking rates.

Around the world, governments are still following Ireland’s lead in clearing the air.

But even ardent health campaigners do not think tobacco is going up in smoke any time soon.